There's no way that there are 8 simultaneous calls on that system at any time, as a matter of fact there were no calls active at all at the time in the log file.

Sadly, when that happens, secast takes the astman/asterisk down with it, making the whole system inaccessible.

How can I get secast to accurately determine the number of simultaneous active calls? If I can't have it resolved, my out resort would be to disable/uninstall secast completely, after a long struggle with dependencies to run it on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

If you are using FreePBX then Sangoma recently started making automatic calls in the background to set 'time condition' variables. In essence FreepBX is making invisible calls, and Asterisk will report these as calls in progress; nothing we can do about it, and that won't explain 8 calls in progress.

So...in a nutshell SecAst does not count calls - it gets that number from Asterisk. Something else is going on with your Asterisk setup. Repeat the first command above once every 30 seconds and watch if your 'calls processed' count is increasing even when users aren't making calls. That should help you figure out why Asterisk is reporting a count you don't expect!

And now the bad news...it sounds like you're struggling with some basic Linux admin and Asterisk admin tasks. If this is a commercial installation I would recommend purchasing 2 hours of support so we can help you through setup. If this is a home installation you probably have a big learning curve ahead of you in terms of Ubuntu and Asterisk - I'm not sure if it's worthwhile for you to continue but we can't really offer free support for Asterisk (or Ubuntu). I'm not sure if you are using a configuration generator either (you don't offer any details of your system), but if this is a commercial installation you may want to move up to a package like xCALLY which provides a very professional turnkey solution without many of the headaches involved with many smaller packages (you don't need to know anything about Linux or Asterisk).